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Olivier Ciechelski ‘Fire in the Valley’
If it was legal and accepted to take the life of a living being in the context of hunting, to kill a domestic animal is considered a crime – he was pretty sure. And as for intentionally starting a fire, that was beyond comprehension : how did these hillbillies become arsonists?***
My third book read this year for the Readers Prize at the Quai du Polar in Lyon. Olivier Ciechelski tells the story…
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Morgan Audic « Nobody Dies at Longyearbyen »
They could be anywhere or hidden in the snow, without you ever realising. Even a few hundred metres away from you. A patient predator with which humans must share the top of the food chain.***
My second book read this year for the Readers Prize at the Quai du Polar in Lyon. I had, so far, never read anything by Audic, never heard of him to be honest but this is a well researched tale. Set in…
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Pierre Lemaitre ‘The Wide World’
—The soldiers, I mean the legionnaires and all that… What exactly do they do?—Operations. The Viets throw grenades at the terraces of the cafés, the legionnaires burn down their villages (when they find them). They take turns to pay each other their respects. The expeditionary forces fight the war, the Viets fight a guérilla war and Saigon gets fat.***
Pierre Lemaitre takes us to « Les Trente…
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Marin Ledun « Free Queens »
« Article 77 bis of the Criminal Code, Obalisi Zebke interrupts. Husbands have the right to « use physical means to punish their wives, so long as these means do not lead to serious corporal damage, which are described as loss of sight, audition or speech, disfigurement or injuries which could lead to death. »***
My first book read this year for the Readers Prize at the Quai du Polar in Lyon.…
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QUAI DU POLAR 2024
First quarter, Quai du Polar: easy to remember! So let’s read for the “Prix des Lecteurs”, the following 6 books are in the running for 2024.
Personne ne meurt à Longyearbyen, Morgan Audic – Éditions Albin Michel
Feux dans la plaine, Olivier Ciechelski – Éditions du Rouergue
Gouine City confidential, Laurène Duclaud – La Manufacture de livres
Free Queens, Marin Ledun – Éditions…
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Jean-Philippe Tousaint « L’Échiquier »
From the very outset of the sanitary crisis, to overcome the threat of idleness, I put together a three headed literary project, made up of three interwoven tasks that I hoped to accomplish simultaneously, the translation of « Chess Story » by Zweig, a more general essay on translation and this book.***
This is a very personal story, told by Toussaint that as the opening quote tells us is…
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Romain Slocombe ‘The Leon Sadorski Affair’
—Top cop, good Frenchman, here he was serving France and its leader, the victor at Verdun. His country was in agony, suffering from a triple cancer Bolshevik, hymie and plutocratic; but now, thanks to the Maréchal, it had begun its convalescence..***
Romain Slocombe takes us back to the worst hours of French collaboration with the Nazis in this well researched novel, fiction but only just, based…
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Vincenzo Latronico ‘Les Perfections’
The NGOs now asked the volunteers to come without telephones and cameras, because the presence of all of these directors and videographers committed to documenting the Tempelhof camp was generating tension between the police and the refugees. ***
Tom and Anna, millennials had moved to East Berlin, straight from university in Italy whilst it was still cheap, they were able to carrying on doing…
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Lauren Groff ‘Matrix’
The fall of Jerusalem, she understands, will make the whole Christian world fall. Christians will be slaughtered and raped and made slaves. Jews throughout the Christian lands will be blamed and caught in their houses and burnt at the stake and murdered without pity; women and children will be buried alive. Famines and conquests and earthquakes and fires and dead bodies littering the…
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Chris de Stoop ‘The Book of Daniel’
They went back to the oaks, relaxed, unable to keep quiet about this successful robbery they’d just carried out, they told the other lads in their gang, including Pascal’s friend Remco and Thomas, Arno’s older brother. They had no thought for the unconscious old man. He was just a living cash machine and they’d made a withdrawal.***
Chris de Stoop, a writer-journalist tells us of the tragic…
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Deborah Levy ‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’
Outside the house in Durban, wired on to the gate, was a big sign: ARMED RESPONSE When I asked what it meant my Godmother who knew everything was happy to explain: ‘If The Blacks break into the house and rob us, my husband, the venerable Edward Charles William, will shoot them, but don’t tell your mother. So while you stay with us you needn’t worry about a thing!’ So far I’d been introduced to…
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Jean-François Beauchemin ‘Le Roitelet’
If my parents visit me so often in my sleep, it’s because they’re less dead than it would appear. There you go, I can hear my brother accusing me of a lack of realism. But it’s not my fault if my mind has always refused to accept the known limits of reality. The only socially acceptable means I’ve found to live with the part of myself that can glimpse “something” more than my senses show me, is…
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The House of Doors
No tree is every ugly Willy, but I must say I prefer the name the Malays give it, did you know they call it the whispering tree?”“Really, why?”“They say that if you stand under a casuarina when the moon is at its fullest you can hear its leaves whispering to you.”“And what would they be whispering?”“Your future and all the things that you desire to know.”“Is it true?”A wan smile ghosted across…
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Calligarich ‘The last Summer in Town‘
If I was lucky I’d find a good book at the station shop and a train not too full, I was lucky. The book was good and the train practically empty. Sadness came over me when the train started to move . When I realised that if it had gone in another direction, any direction it would have all been the same to me.***
Leo Gazzarra was seriously adrift in the Rome of the late 1960s, as he reaches the…
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Emma Cline
Alex was a sort of inert piece of social furniture—only her presence was required, the general size and shape of a young woman. Anything beyond the fact of her sitting in her chair and nodding along was a distraction. Occasionally, Simon put his hand on the back of Alex’s neck, or patted her shoulder.
We meet Emma Cline’s Guest, Alex, a young girl at the start of this book, read for the Roman de…
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Jacky Schwartzmann ‘Shit’
Without agreeing it first, Mme Ramla and I stepped over Elvis’s body and went into the apartment. Civility, lurid curiosity, madness. Maybe there was still someone to save. It could only be Halim the older brother. Whilst advancing in the corridor, I was thinking: “I mustn’t pollute the crime scene.” I could still hear the moaning. Stop watching TV series, idiot, try to do something for the…
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Marie Charrel 'Les Mangeurs de nuit'
Aika can read the embarrassment in Kuma’s face. That’s all she needs to understand: everything is lies. The fortune in America, the money, the life of a princess promised in the letters: hot air. A fraud aimed at making her cross the ocean to join him. Were her parents aware? No, of course not, they were cheated as well. Unless they kept the truth from her, happy to have placed her? Kuma Hirano…
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